When he was better, he and Lottie moved to Berlin. And I missed the hell out of him. I missed them both, but Dietrich and I were unusually close. Maybe a little too close. Some of the guys we worked with thought we were gay. Seriously, we’re not; I don’t know, over the years, all the shit we did together, all the time we spent together, how could we not be really close? So he moved to Berlin and went from being the most badass guy I know to working on his fucking PhD in physics. Physics. Six months ago, he was beating the shit out of people and solving international – and apparently, intergalactic – mysteries, and now he was going to be a doctor. In physics. Ok, I was secretly a little proud of him, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.
A few months ago, he and Lottie got married. Finally. Before she died, she had been planning this big, elaborate wedding. This time, Dietrich called me right after they moved and told me they were going to get married soon and I needed to get my ass over there. So I did. No elaborate wedding, no church, no big fancy reception. Lydia and I both went and that was the entire wedding party. And honestly? It was probably the coolest wedding I’ve ever been to. Sure, a big part of it was knowing what they’d been through, the impossible odds they’d overcome and the fact this was even happening, but if you could see the way those two love each other, you’d see what I mean – Lottie never needed any of that fancy shit. She was the most beautiful bride I’d ever seen, because I swear to God, she lit up from the moment she saw Dietrich waiting for her in that room.
And me? Mark, who helped us out with all the shit going down in Baton Rouge with Lottie and Lydia, was my new partner and he was good but it wasn’t the same. But I wouldn’t change the way any of this worked out. And, oh yeah, Mark was in love with Lydia who was still clinging to this crush on me. Dietrich called it the sci-fi love triangle of our group. Lydia lived with another friend of theirs in Nashville, but Mark and I still checked on her often. Mark more often than me.
A few weeks ago, Dietrich told me he and Lottie were coming to Houston to visit right after Christmas; I tried to play it cool and act like I wasn’t actually really fucking excited about it. It would be the first time they’d been back in the States since leaving. Lydia was coming, too, so apparently, we were going to ring in the New Year with one big Close Encounters of the Third Kind party. That was our plan anyway. Because we really thought all of this shit with these bastards who wanted Lottie and Lydia dead was over with; even if Dietrich had left the intelligence world behind him, Mark and I were still here. We thought there was this mutual understanding that if they left us alone, we’d leave them alone. But we were wrong.
Resurrected (Resurrected Series Book 1) Page 22